Puryear: "I was ready to take the fight with Diaz 24 hours before the tournament"

Former interim UFC lightweight champion Dustin Porier has revealed that he could have been Nate Diaz's opponent when he failed the weigh-in before his fight with Khamzat Chimaev at UFC 279 in September 2022.

"Hell yeah, I agreed to fight Nate 24 hours before the fight itself. The plan was to fly to Vegas and go straight to the weigh-in ceremony. I'll tell you what happened. Mike Brown came to Louisiana to visit me for a couple days. We had dinner, went to bed, and Friday morning my phone was crackling with the number of missed calls and messages. I asked my manager what was wrong. They explained to me that Chimaev hadn't made the weight and asked if I could get down to 77 pounds.

I said yes. And to confirm that I would be able to make weight safely, I was contacted by the Nevada State Athletic Commission via video call. They demanded that I get on the scale. At that point, my weight was in the neighborhood of 80 pounds. I was scheduled to fly to Vegas that same day. I was really on a weight race. But the UFC made a different decision on Nate," Puryear said on The MMA Hour show.